A Real ‘Peach’: Japan’s 1st Budget Airline

By Hiroyuki Kachi and Mariko Sanchanta

Japan’s first low cost carrier A&F Aviation president Shinichi Inoue unveils the company’s brand name “Peach Aviation” and its colored model of their jetliner on May 24.

A&F Aviation Co., Ltd.

Uniforms to be worn by Peach flight attendants.

Japan’s first budget airline, Peach, was unveiled on Tuesday. The name of the airline is supposed to “invoke positive images such as youthfulness, energy, generosity and longevity”, according to the airline. “The name Peach was chosen to reflect our mission of becoming a completely new type of airline that links destinations in Japan and Japan with Asia. Our promise is to provide safe, low-cost travel 365 days of the year, making air travel easier and more accessible,” said Peach Aviation CEO, Shinichi Inoue.

Strangely, the color scheme of the airline’s interior is not peach-hued, but rather a light shade of magenta. The outfits for cabin crew are surprisingly casual by Japanese standards, with the women cabin crew outfitted in – gasp – trousers instead of the traditional skirt, scarf and heels combo favored by the country’s two dominant airlines: Japan Airlines and ANA.

But the future of Peach may be anything but rosy: it is kicking off flight operations just as the number of travelers from overseas destinations has tumbled following the March 11 earthquake and the resulting nuclear disaster. How the airline manages to woo tourists from the rest of Asia back to Japan is key. The low-cost carrier, affiliated with ANA, will start flights from its home base – Kansai International Airport in Osaka. Flight services to Sapporo of northern Japan and to Fukuoka of southern Japan is expected to start no later than March 2012, followed by flight to Seoul’s Incheon airport in May 2012.

Peach aims to grab 6 million customers with 16 jets five years after its launch. If it fails to achieve this target, it might just have to change its name to…yep, you guessed it: Lemon.

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Japan Real Time is a newsy, concise guide to what works, what doesn’t and why in the one-time poster child for Asian development, as it struggles to keep pace with faster-growing neighbors while competing with Europe for Michelin-rated restaurants. Drawing on the expertise of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires, the site provides an inside track on business, politics and lifestyle in Japan as it comes to terms with being overtaken by China as the world’s second-biggest economy. You can contact the editors at japanrealtime@wsj.com